Friday, 8 June 2012

Recycling firm fined £200,000 for loader fatality

A decision to allow an unsupervised,
inexperienced 21-year-old worker to operate a poorly-maintained loader
had fatal consequences, a court has heard.

Mark Bate, of Tipton,
West Midlands, was killed instantly when the arm of a JCB skid-steer
loader crushed his head on 12 June 2008. He had been driving the vehicle
at SITA UK Ltd’s premises on the Coneygre Industrial Estate for three
months without being properly trained.

On the day of the
incident, he was working on his own to load scrap paper on to a
conveyor. Once he had finished, he brought the load to a halt and raised
the safety bar from across his lap to isolate the machine. But the
vehicle failed to isolate and, as he leant out of the front of the
vehicle, the loader’s arm fell and crushed his head against the machine,
killing him immediately.

The HSE investigation found that Mr
Bate had never received formal training or assessment in the use of the
vehicle, and a self-employed maintenance engineer had also used it over
several months with no training. In addition, the court heard the
loader had not been maintained in the eight months before the incident.
It should have been serviced at least twice during this period.

Appearing
at Wolverhampton Crown Court on 1 June, SITA UK was fined £200,000 and
ordered to pay full costs of £77,402, after pleading guilty to breaching
s2(1) and s3(1) of the HSWA 1974. The company was also
instructed to reimburse Mr Bate’s mother, Catherine Jones, £4450 in
funeral costs. Following
the case, HSE inspector David Evans said: “Mark Bate was a young man
who should have had a long life ahead of him. Instead, he was killed in
an entirely avoidable tragedy. Despite knowing his lack of experience,
SITA left him unsupervised to operate the loader. Furthermore, the
vehicle was dangerous because it had not been properly maintained. The company’s risk assessment should have identified these issues but did not cover the use of this machine.”